Playbook For Promoting Your Get Satisfaction Community And Driving Engagement

http://ow.ly/hsc9k, 15 Best Practices to Drive Community Attendance & Engagement , A Get Satisfaction customer community will help you deliver excellent customer support at a lower cost, drive product innovation, and acquire more customers. Our customers have achieved great results:

In order to achieve these results, you first have to promote your community and get your members to engage. The good news is, there are some proven best practices that make it easy to get people to your community and encourage them to interact with one another.

Check out our latest eBook, Playbook For Promoting Your Get Satisfaction Community And Driving Engagement to learn 15 best practices.

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PROMOTING YOUR COMMUNITYThe first step in creating an effective customer community is community in your site’s navigation, so visitors know where to go togetting your customers to the community. The data we collect with share their feedback and get their questions answered.our Community Health Analytics have shown that the businessbenefits and health of a community are directly correlated with how Example:many people are participating in the community. Take the time todrive attendance to it, and you will reduce support costs, generatemarketing content, and drive product innovation and testing by thecommunity.There are several things you can do to drive traffic and encouragecommunity participation. Follow these best practices to get started.Bring Relevant Customer Conversationsinto your website!Your customer community can only be as effective as it is visible,so make sure it’s open, inviting, and easy-to-find! Get Satisfactionoffers simple, out of the box code (or widgets, for you techiesout there) that allows you to embed community conversationsanywhere on your website. Announce it on your blogGet Satisfaction offers seven widget types, which allow you to Your company blog is as a great resource for your customersexpose relevant customer-generated content anywhere you regarding everything YOU-related, so be sure to leverage it whenwant on your website. Filter by topic type, for example, to expose promoting your community. Write a post announcing your newconversations about a specific product next to it on the page; use community. Explain its purpose, outline a few best practices orthe “Company Updates” widget to place dynamic information and community guidelines, and include instructional screenshots. Youannouncements in the About Us or News page. Include a link to the have more leeway to go into depth in a blog post than you do over social, so take the opportunity to give specific instructions as to accessing and participating in your community. PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 2

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Promote it on Your Social Channels The same goes if you have a Twitter account. Promote yourSpeaking of social…if you’ve got a Facebook Page (who are we community early and often. Use bit.ly or other link shorteners tokidding? Even your grandmother has a Facebook page), you’ll want make the link to your community 140 character-friendly. Encourageto use it to point your friends and fans to your new community. people to visit your community with a Tweet like: “We’re here for you! Get your questions answered quickly with our newAdd the Get Satisfaction for Facebook Application to make both @GetSatisfaction community,” or follow HootSuite’s lead in theyour community and your Facebook page more effective. Just example below:add and connect the app to your Get Satisfaction account, andcontent posted in the Facebook App will be mirrored over in yourcommunity and vice versa. This makes the feedback you receiveon your Facebook page more actionable and archivable, anddrives traffic and engagement in your community. It also comeswith a number of other handy features like single sign-on, privatefeedback, and configurable prompts. Get Satisfaction’s integration with HootSuite allows you to bring interactions from Twitter, Facebook and other social channels into your community, connecting your employees, customers, and prospects. This allows answers to questions posed in social media to become persistent resources for other customers and prospects. These conversations in your Get Satisfaction Community become part of your social knowledge base and are highly indexed by search engines, improving your community’s SEO. PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 3

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Send a newsletter announcement Promote from your other support resourcesYour internal database is a good place to start promoting your Odds are, there’s more than one place your customers can turn tocommunity, since the people who read your emails tend to be the have their support questions answered. Be sure to announce andones who are most interested and engaged with your product. promote your community from all of these places—online tutorials,Include a link and some basic information in your monthly static FAQs and Knowledge Bases, Bulletin Boards, older forums,newsletter. etc. This will redirect your customers looking for answers to product questions there to your community, which is a more effective placeAdd links to the footers of email responses for self-service and social resolution than static, more traditionalA healthy customer community will reduce the number of email help centers.exchanges you have with your customers since they’ll be findingthe answers to their questions on their own in your community. Use Surface it in your applicationyour email exchanges to drive them there by including links to your A customer community is a great, in-app way to identify bugs, testcommunity in the footers of all relevant email correspondence— product updates, and collect real-time feedback about your web orsupport emails, trouble ticketing responses, and marketing emails. mobile application. Provide access directly to the community from within the app, and install a Feedback Widget to capture in-contextExample: feedback and questions. Record a welcome video and post it What a better way to greet your customers and set a warm, friendly tone than with a video? It doesn’t have to be fancy. Create a quick video using an iPhone or webcam to welcome members to your community and explain its purpose. You can also include a screencast explaining how to effectively use the community. Post the video in your community as well as on your YouTube channel and SlideShare account. PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 4

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Example:Get creative! members. Incentivize people to participate by offering coupons,Run a contest, host a give-away, send a press release, or think of points, or other prizes. Don’t forget to keep the big picture in mindother fun ways to promote your community! This will drive new by creating a contest, for example, that will generate content thatmembers to your community as well as energize established you can then reuse for marketing or other purposes. PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 5

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ENGAGING YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERSOnce you’re doing all you can to encourage your users to get to your Rapid response timecommunity, you then need to create a “sticky” experience for them Giving customers — especially when your community is fairly new –so that they continue to return to the community to engage with the quick satisfaction of a rapid response to their question is a greatyou and other customers. Follow these best practices to create an way to engage them and reward them for using the community. Ifengaging community for your customers: they feel like their voice is heard and responded to quickly, they’ll be more likely to return to the community again and again.Seed your community with contentYou probably already have an idea of the questions and issues that Be human and use a friendly toneyour support team receives most often. Place your FAQs in there This suggestion might seem obvious, but we’ve found that notright off the bat as topics, so the answers will already be available everyone intuitively gets how important it is to be human andwhen your first customers come looking for them. use a friendly tone in your community. You want to start building relationships with the customers who visit your community, butPeriodically post topics or content to generate ideas and drive you’re not going to do that with an unfriendly tone and a bunch ofengagement, such as asking for feedback on future products. You’ll customer service jargon. Be human and genuinely empathetic. Notbe amazed at the gems of ideas your customers have to offer when sure if your response sounds authentic or not? Say it out loud toprompted. your coworker. How does it feel coming out of your mouth? HowEducate your customers does it sound to them? The answer to those questions will let youThe better your customers understand the way you want them know whether to post your response or keep fine-tuning it.to participate in your community and what they can expect from Include your picture as an avatar, so your customers know whoyou, the more likely they’ll be to use it to truly engage with you. they’re talking to. Always be honest. Honesty builds trust, which inProvide content to help your customers understand how to use turn builds relationships and breeds loyalty.your community and what its purpose is. Let them know the hoursyou’ll be responsive there and how long they can expect to wait Solicit ideas and sharing of best practicesbefore they hear back from you. Include some best practices and Your community members use your products and servicescommunity guidelines so they feel confident participating. everyday, so they’re a great resource to leverage for product innovation. Ask for ideas from the community, feedback on specific PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 6

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features or products and encourage them to share their own bestpractices with your products and services. Example: Prezi routinely turns to their community to test out product ideas, solve problems, and gain real-time feedback:Positive reinforcement and speaking up on your behalf, the fewer questions you have toBe sure to encourage your customers when you see them chiming respond to. Consider implementing a Champs program as a wayin and helping each other. The more open, friendly and helpful to systematically incentivize and activate brand advocates andyour whole community is, the more new visitors will want to champions.stay. And the more Champions you have answering questions PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 7

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CONCLUSIONThere you have it. Driving attendance and engagement to your will turn them into brand advocates whose conversations can becommunity is not some mysterious, daunting task, but rather used as rich word-of-mouth content that drives down support costssomething which you can do quickly and easily using the tools and brings in revenue.at your disposal. By building a thriving community with lots of So, try our suggestions for yourself, and let us know about yourcustomers, topics, and conversations, you are building engagement experience in our own community. Your customers and yourwith your consumers at every stage of the customer lifecycle. That business results will thank you for it. Interested in learning more about how a Get Satisfaction customer community can help you acquire more customers, drive product innovation, and deliver excellent, low-cost social support? 877-339-3997 to schedule a demo, or visit us at https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/solutions/index PLAYBOOK FOR PROMOTING YOUR GET SATISFACTION COMMUNITY AND DRIVING ENGAGEMENT 8